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THE ELEVENTH HOUR 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

From a Drawing by John Elliott 



The Eleventh Hour 

in the Life of 
JuHa Ward Howe 



BY 

MAUD HOWE 



BOSTON 

LITTLE, BROWN, AND COMPANY 

1911 






Copyright, 1911, 
Bt Little, Brown, and Company. 

All rights reserved 



Published, October, 1911 



ElectrotypedandPrintedby 
THE COLONIAL PRESS 
C. H. Simonds & Co., Boston, U. S. A. 



©CI.A297742 



AD MATREM 

The acorns are again ripe on your oaks, the leaves of 
your nut tree begin to turn gold, the fruit trees you 
planted a lustre since, droop with their weight of crim- 
son fruit, the little grey squirrels leap nimbly from 
bough to bough busily preparing for winter's siege. 
The air is fragrant with the perfume of wild grape, 
joyous with the voices of children passing to the white 
school house on the hill. The earth laughs with the joy 
of the harvest. What thank offering can I bring for 
this year that has not yet taught me how to live with- 
out you? Only this sheaf of gleanings from your fields! 

Oak Glen, September, 1911. 



FOREWORD 

This slight and hasty account of 
some of my mother's later activities was 
written to read to a small group of 
friends with whom I wished to share the 
lesson of the Eleventh Hour of a life 
filled to the end with the joy of toil. 
More than one of my hearers asked me 
to print what I had read them, in the 
belief that it would be of value to that 
larger circle of her friends, the public. 
Such a request could not be refused. 



THE ELEVENTH HOUR 

IN THE LIFE OF 

JULIA WARD HOWE 

My mother's diary for 1906, her 
eighty-seventh year, opens with this 
entry: 

^^ I pray for many things this year. 
For myself, I ask continued health 
of mind and body, work, useful, hon- 
orable and as remunerative as it shall 
please God to send. For my dear fam- 
ily, work of the same description with 
comfortable wages, faith in God, and 
love to each other. For my country, 
that she may keep her high promise 
to mankind, for Christendom, that 
it may become more Christlike, for 
1 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

the struggling nationalities, that they 
may attain to justice and peace/' 

Not vain the prayer! Health of 
mind and body was granted, work, 
useful, honorable, if not very remuner- 
ative, was hers that year and nearly 
five years more, for she Uved to be 
ninety-one and a half years old. When 
Death came and took her, he found 
her still at work. Hers the fate of 
the happy warrior who falls in thick 
of battle, his harness on his back. 
How did she do it? 
Hardly a day passes that I am 
not asked the question! 

Shortly before her death, she spoke 
of the time when she would no longer 
be with us — an almost unheard-of 
thing for her to do. We turned the 
subject, begged her not to dwell on it. 
2 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

''Yes!" she laughed with the old 
flash that has kindled a thousand 
audiences, '' it's not my business to 
think about dying, it's my business to 
think about living! '' 

This thinking about Hving, this tre- 
mendous vitality had much to do 
with her long service, for the impor- 
tant thing of course was not that she 
Uved ninety-one years, but that she 
worked for more than ninety-one 
years, never became a cumberer of 
the earth, paid her scot till the last. 
She never knew the pathos of doing 
old-age work, such as is provided in 
every class for those inveterate work- 
ers to whom labor is as necessary as 
bread or breath. The old ploughman 
sits by the wayside breaking stones 
to mend the road others shall travel 
3 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

over; the old prima donna listens to 
her pupils' triumphs; the old states- 
man gives after-dinner speeches, or 
makes himself a nuisance by speaking 
or writing, ex cathedra, on any ques- 
tion that needs airing, whether it is 
his subject or not; she did good, vig- 
orous work till the end, in her own 
chosen calHngs of poet and orator. 
What she produced in her last year 
was as good in quahty as any other 
year's output. The artist in her never 
stopped growing; indeed, her latest 
work has a lucidity, a robust simplic- 
ity, that some of the earlier writings 
lack. 

In the summer of 1909 she was 

asked to write a poem on Fulton for 

the Fulton-Hudson celebration. Ever 

better than her word, she not only 

4 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

wrote the poem, but recited it in the 
New York Metropohtan Opera House 
on the evening of September 9th. 
Those who saw her, the only woman 
amid that great gathering of repre- 
sentative men from all over the world, 
will not forget the breathless silence 
of that vast audience as she came 
forward, leaning on her son's arm, 
and read the opening Hnes: 

A river flashing like a gem, 
Crowned with a mountain diadem, — 

or the thunders of applause that fol- 
lowed the last lines: 

While pledge of Love's assured control, 
The Flag of Freedom crowns the pole. 

The poem had given her a good deal 
of trouble, the last couplet in especial. 
The morning of the celebration, 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

when I went into Mrs. Seth Low^s 
spare bedroom to wake her, she cried 
out: 

'^ I have got my last verse! '' 

She was much distressed that the 
poem appeared in Collier's without 
the amended closing lines. The fault 
was mine; I had arranged with the 
editor Mr. Hapgood for its pubUcation. 
She had done so much '^ free gratis '' 
work all her life that it seemed fitting 
this poem should at least earn her, 
her travelling expenses. 

" Let this be a lesson,'^ she said, 
" never print a poem or a speech till 
it has been delivered; always give 
the eleventh hour its chance! '^ 

It may be interesting here to recall 
that the Atlantic Monthly paid her 
five dollars for the Battle Hymn of 
6 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

the Republic, the only money she 
ever received for it. 

Her power of keeping abreast of the 
times is felt in the Fulton poem, where 
she rounds out her eulogy of Fulton ^s 
invention of the steamboat with a 
tribute to Peary. Only a few days 
before the news of our latest arctic 
triumph had flashed round the world, 
her world, whose business was her 
business as long as she lived in it; so 
into the fabric of the poem in honor of 
Fulton, she weaves an allusion to this 
new victory. 

On her ninety-first birthday a re- 
porter from a Boston paper asked her 
for a motto for the women of America. 
She was sitting on the little balcony 
outside her town house, reading her 
Greek Testament, when the young man 
7 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

was announced. She closed her book, 
thought for a moment, then gave the 
motto that so well expressed herself: 

^^Up to date!'^ 

Was there ever anything more char- 
acteristic? 

In December, 1909, the last Decem- 
ber she was to see, she wrote a poem 
called '^The Capitol,^' for the first 
meeting of the American Academy 
of Arts and Letters at Washington. 
The poem, published in the Century 
Magazine for March, 1910, is as good 
as any she ever wrote, with one excep- 
tion — the Battle Hymn; and that, 
as she has told us, ^^ wrote itself." 
She had arranged to go to Washing- 
ton to read her poem before the As- 
sociation. Though we feared the win- 
ter journey for her, she was so bent 
8 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

on going that I very reluctantly agreed 
to accompany her, A telegram, signed 
by William Dean Howells, Robert Un- 
derwood Johnson, and Thomas Nelson 
Page, all officers of the Association, urg- 
ing her not to take the risk of so long a 
journey in winter, induced her to give 
up the trip. She was rather nettled by 
the kindly hint and flashed out: 

^^ Hah! they think that I am too 
old, but there^s a little ginger left in 
the old blue jar! " 

She never thought of herself as old, 
therefore she never was really old in 
the essentials. Her iron will, her in- 
domitable spirit, held her frail body 
to its duty till the very end. 

'' Life is hke a cup of tea, the sugar 
is all at the bottom! ^^ she cried one 
day. This was the very truth; she 
9 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

knew no " winter of discontent/' Her 
autumn was all Indian summer, glori- 
ous with crimson leaves, purple and 
gold sunsets. 

In April, 1910, she wrote the third 
and last of her poems to her beloved 
friend and '^ Minister '^ James Free- 
man Clarke. She read this poem 
twice, at the centenary celebration 
of Mr. Clarke's birth held at the 
Church of the Disciples, April 3rd, 
and the day after at the Arlington 
St. Church. Compared with the verses 
written for Mr. Clarke's fiftieth birth- 
day and with those celebrating his 
seventieth birthday, this latest poem 
is to me the best. The opening lines 
bite right into the heart of the matter; 
as she read them standing in the pul- 
pit a thrill passed through the congre- 
10 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

gation of her fellow disciples gathered 
together in memory of their founder. 

Richer gift can no man give 
Than he doth from God receive. 
We in greatness would have pleasure, 
But we must accept our measure. 
Let us question, then, the grave, 
Querying what the Master gave, 
Whom, in his immortal state. 
Grateful love would celebrate. 

Only human life was his, 
With its thin-worn mysteries. 

Lifting from the Past its veil, 
What of his does now avail? 
Just a mirror in his breast 
That revealed a heavenly guest. 
And the love that made us free 
Of the same high company. 

The poem on Abraham Lincoln 

written for the Lincoln Centenary 

and read by her at the meeting in 

Symphony Hall, Boston, February 

11 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

12th, 1909, is perhaps the best of the 
innumerable memorial poems she com- 
posed. As one by one the centena- 
ries of this and that member of the 
band of great men and women who 
made our country illustrious in the 
19th Century were celebrated, it came 
to be considered as a matter of course 
that she, almost the last survivor of 
that noble company, should write a 
poem for the occasion. So difficult a 
critic as Professor Barrett Wendell 
said to me that he considered some of 
the stanzas of the Lincoln poem as 
good as the Battle Hymn. I remember 
he particularly liked the last two verses, 

A treacherous shot, a sob of rest, 
A martyr's palm upon his breast, 
A welcome from the glorious seat 
Where blameless souls of heroes meet; 
12 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

And, thrilling through unmeasured days, 
A song of gratitude and praise; 
A cry that all the earth shall heed. 
To God, who gave him for our need. 

During her last summer she was in 
correspondence with her friend Mr. 
Garrison about the pubhcation of a 
volume that should gather up into one 
sheaf these scattered occasional poems. 
She had this much on her mind and 
made every endeavor to collect the 
poems together: some of them had 
never been printed, and of others she 
possessed no copy. She stopped in 
Boston on her way to Smith College 
in the last days of last September, and 
spent an afternoon in her Beacon St. 
house looking for some of those lost 
poems. Her wish was fulfilled, and 
the posthumous volume, to which we 
13 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

gave the title ^^ At Sunset/' lies be- 
side me. Look down the page of con- 
tents and note how various are the 
names that figure in the list of per- 
sonal poems, and what a wide range of 
character they show; beginning with 
Lincoln, Doctor Holmes, Washington 
AUston, Robert E. Lee, Whittier, Lucy 
Stone, Phillips Brooks, Robert Brown- 
ing, Archbishop Williams, and ending 
with Michael Anagnos — this is a wide 
swath to cut, wide as her own sym- 
pathy. 

One poem of hers that has soothed 
many a wounded heart should be bet- 
ter known than I believe it to be. 
Though it has no dedication, it 
might well be dedicated to the men 
and women who have tried, and who 
to the world seem to have tried in vain. 
14 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

ENDEAVOR 

*' What hast thou for thy scattered seed, 

O Sower of the plain? 
Where are the many gathered sheaves 

Thy hope should bring again? " 
'* The only record of my work 

Lies in the buried grain. '^ 

" Conqueror of a thousand fields! 

In dinted armor dight, 
What growths of purple amaranth 

Shall crown thy brow of might? '^ 
" Only the blossom of my life 

Flung widely in the fight." 

" What is the harvest of thy saints, 

OGod! who dost abide? 
Where grow the garlands of thy chiefs 

In blood and sorrow dyed? 
What have thy servants for their pains? *' 

'' This only, — to have tried." 

On the 26th of July, 1908, she wrote: 

'' The thought came to me that if 

God only looked upon me, I should 

become radiant like a star.'^ This 

16 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

thought is embodied in the following 

quatrain. 

Wouldst thou on me but turn thy wondrous 

sight, 
My breast would be so flooded by thy light, 
The light whose language is immortal song. 
That I to all the ages should belong. 

Two lines of hers have always 
seemed to me to express above all 
others her life's philosophy: 

In the house of labor best 
Can I build the house of rest ! 

Of all her labors, heavy and varied 

as those of Hercules, her poetry was 

what she loved best. But she lived 

in an age when there are few who 

can take their spiritual meat in verse. 

The age of steel is an age of prose, 

and so she labored in season and out 

to give her message in prose as well 

as in poetry, with the spoken word as 

16 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

well as the written. She was the most 
willing of troubadours; she hastened 
gladly wherever she was called, whether 
it was to some stately banquet of the 
muses hke the Bryant Centenary, or 
to a humble company of illiterate 
negroes, in the poor Httle chapel at 
Santo Domingo, where she preached 
all one season. Whether some rich 
and powerful association like the 
Woman's Club at Chicago summoned 
her or some modest group of working 
women on Cape Cod, she was always 
ready. She asked no fee, but accepted 
what was given her. She spoke and 
wrote oftenest for love, and next often 
for an honorarium of five dollars. The 
first need of her being was to give. So 
much had been given to her that she 
was forever trying to pay the debt by 
17 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

giving of her store to others. I find in 
her own handwriting the best expres- 
sion of this need of giving, that was per- 
haps the prime necessity of her Hfe. 

^' I, for one, feel that my indebted- 
ness grows with my years. And it 
occurred to me the other day that when 
I should depart from this earthly 
scene, ^^ God's poor Debtor '^ might be 
the fittest inscription for my grave- 
stone, if I should have one. So much 
have I received from the great Giver, 
so little have I been able to return. '^ 

One day a rash scatter-brained fel- 
low who was always getting himself 
and others into hot water asked her 
this question: 

'^ Is it not always our duty to sac- 
rifice ourselves for others? '' 

She knew very well that he was con- 
18 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

templating a perfectly reckless step 
and was trying to hoodwink her — 
and himself — into thinking the action 
noble, because it would be so disad- 
vantageous to himself. The boy I 
fear forgot her answer; here it is for 
you to remember and lay to heart. 

^' We must always remember that 
we come into the world alone, that we 
go out of the world alone, that there 
is nothing to us but ourselves.'' 

Certain things, she held, we must 
sacrifice, selfish personal ends, com- 
fort, pleasure, ease, but if we are to 
fight the good fight we must not make 
the fancied sacrifice of letting our 
arms rust while we lay them down to 
fight another's battle — nine times out 
of ten an easier thing to do than to 
fight our own. She had met with so 
19 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

much opposition all her life through 
serving the unpopular causes of Aboli- 
tion, Woman^s Suffrage, Religious Free- 
dom, she had fought so grimly for 
what, when she entered the ranks, 
always seemed a Forlorn Hope, that 
she knew the real joy lies in the battle, 
not in the victory. 

Her last public appearance in Boston 
was at a hearing in the State House, 
where she came to plead for the cause 
of pure milk. This was on the 23rd 
of May, 1910, four days before her 
ninety-first birthday. There had been 
a great deal about the Pure Milk 
Crusade in the newspapers, the Bos- 
ton Journal had made a special ques- 
tion of it and one of the reporters had 
already interviewed her on the subject. 
The Chairman of the Massachusetts 
20 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

Milk Consumer's Association had 
asked her to give her name as honorary 
president of the league. This she was 
glad to do, but this was not enough, 
she wanted to do more. I was called 
up once or twice on the 'phone and 
asked if I thought Mrs. Howe was 
able to speak before the legislative 
committee at one of the hearings. I 
thought that with the birthday fes- 
tivities so near and the fatigue of 
moving down to Newport before her, 
this would be a little too much, and 
consequently ^' begged off.'' In these 
days there was a meeting in Cam- 
bridge in memory of Margaret Fuller. 
She was invited to be present, and 
was determined to go. 

^' They have not asked me to speak,'' 
she said more than once. 
21 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

^' Of course they will ask you when 
they see you/' I assured her. 

^' I have my poem on Margaret 
written for her Centenary/' she said. 

'' Take it with you/' I advised. '' Of 
course you will be asked to say some- 
thing, and then you will have your 
poem in your pocket and be all pre- 
pared." 

I was unable to go with her to the 
meeting, a young lady who came to 
read aloud to her going in my place. 
They came back late in the afternoon; 
the meeting had been long and I saw 
immediately that she was very tired. 
The cause of this soon appeared. 

^^ They did not ask me to speak/' 
she said, ^^ and I was the only person 
present who had known Margaret 
and remembered her." 
22 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

I was deeply troubled about this. 
I saw that she had been hurt, and I 
knew that if I had gone to the meeting 
I could have managed to let it be 
known that she had brought her poem 
to read. For a very little time she was 
a good deal depressed by the incident 
— felt she was out of the race, no longer 
entered on the card for the running. 

Very soon after this they telephoned 
me that there would be another hear- 
ing on the milk question at half past 
ten, and that it would probably go 
on all the morning. She had been 
very bright when she came down to 
breakfast and made a capital meal. 
When I went into her room, I found 
her at her desk all ready for the day's 
campaign, though I knew that the 
Margaret Fuller incident still rankled. 
23 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

^^ There's to be a hearing at the 
State House on the milk question; 
they want you dreadfully to speak/' 

She was all alert and full of interest 
in a moment. 

'' What do you say, shall we go? '' 

^^ Give me half an hour! " 

I left her for that half hour. When 
I returned she had sketched out her 
speech and dressed herself in her best 
flowered silk cloak and her new lilac 
satin and lace hood — a birthday gift 
from a poor seamstress. We drove 
to the State House together, and after 
some difficulty in finding the right 
lift finally reached the room where 
the hearing was going on. She had 
made these notes for her speech, but 
had not brought them with her; we 
found them afterward in her desk. 
24 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

'' It seems to me that the theme of 
this hearing is one which should com- 
mend itself to all good citizens. I 
think that even our patient American 
public is tired of the delay, for al- 
though we are in many ways a happy 
people, I do think that our public is a 
long suffering one. I should think that 
we might hope for a speedy settle- 
ment. For we are not discussing points 
of taste and pleasure, but matters of 
life and death. There are various 
parties concerned in the desired set- 
tlement, but to my mind the party 
most nearly concerned is the infant 
who comes into this world relying upon 
a promise which we are bound to fulfil, 
the promise that he shall at least en- 
joy the conditions of Hfe. I learn from 
men of science that no possible sub- 
25 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

stitute exists for good milk in the 
rearing of infants. How can we then 
delay the action which shall secure 
it?'^ 

She Ustened to the long speeches 
with interest, little realizing that this 
was to be her last public appearance 
in Boston. When the time came for 
her to speak, it was noticed that while 
all the others took the oath upon the 
Bible to speak the truth, the whole 
truth and nothing but the truth, the 
ceremony was omitted with her. As 
her name was called she rose and 
stepped forward leaning on my arm. 

'^ You may remain seated, Mrs. 
Howe/' said the Chairman. 

'^ I prefer to stand,'' was the an- 
swer. So, standing in the place where, 
year after year, she had stood to ask 
26 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

for the full rights of citizenship, for 
the right to vote, she made her last 
thrilling appeal for justice. Her keen 
wit, her power of hitting the nail on 
the head, were never used to better 
purpose. The hearing had been long 
and tedious. There had been many 
speeches, the farmers who produce the 
milk, the dealers who sell it, worthy 
citizens who were trying to improve 
the quahty of the milk supply, ex- 
perts whose testimony showed the far 
from ideal conditions under which the 
milk of the great city is brought to 
its consumers. Everything had been 
proper, commonplace, prosaic, deadly 
dull. Her speech was short and to 
the point, giving in a few words the 
whole crux of the matter. Her pres- 
ence, the presence of the old Sybil, 
27 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

mother, grandmother, great-grand- 
mother was extraordinarily romantic, 
it hfted the whole occasion out of the 
realm of the commonplace into that of 
the poetic. Her speech followed in 
substance the notes she had prepared, 
but it was enhanced with touches of 
eloquence such as this: 

'' We have heard a great deal about 
the farmers' and the dealers' side of 
this case. We want the matter settled 
on the ground of justice and mercy; 
it ought not to take long to settle what 
is just to all parties: justice to all! 
Let us stand on that. There is one 
deeply interested party however, of 
whom we have heard nothing. He 
cannot speak for himself, I am here 
to speak for him, the infant! '' 

The impression made was over- 
28 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

whelming. This ancient Norn, grave 
and beautiful as the elder Fate, claim- 
ing Justice for the infant in the cradle ! 
The effect upon the audience was elec- 
trical. The roughest ^' hayseed '' in 
the chamber ^^ sat up; '' the meanest 
dealer was moved, the sleepiest legis- 
lator awoke. The silence in that place 
of creaking chairs, and coughing citi- 
zens, was amazing. All listened as 
to a prophetess as, step by step, she 
unfolded the case of the infant as 
against farmer and dealer. When Mr. 
Arthur Dehon Hill, the Counsel for 
the Association, led her from the room 
he said: 

" Mrs. Howe, you have scored our 
first point.'' 

The friend, who had called in her 
help, was one of the strongest ^' Anti- 
29 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

Suffragists. '^ This was a very char- 
acteristic happening. Whenever any 
great question of pubHc interest, not 
connected with Woman Suffrage, came 
up, the " antis '' were continually com- 
ing to ask her help. If the cause was a 
good one she always gave it. She was 
no respecter of persons; the cause 
was the thing. Over and over again 
she was appealed to by those who were 
moving heaven and earth to oppose 
her in Suffrage, to help some of their 
lesser ends. She was always ready; 
always hitched her rope to their mired 
wagon and helped pull with a will. 
Her wagon was hitched to a star, the 
force celestial in her tow rope was at 
the service of all who asked for it in a 
good cause. 
A few days after the State-house 
30 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

hearing, she fell in her own room and 
broke a rib. She recovered from the 
effects of this and in the last days of 
June moved down to her place at 
Portsmouth, Rhode Island, where she 
passed nearly four happy months with 
children, grandchildren and great- 
grandchildren about her. Three weeks 
before her death she wrote to the 
Reverend Ada Bowles: 

^' I have it in mind to write some 
open letters about Religion and to 
publish them in the Woman's Jour- 
nal.^' 

She was at work upon the first of 
these, a definition of true Religion, 
when the end came. Her last Tuesday 
on earth, she presided at the Pape- 
terie, a social club of Newport ladies, 
in whose meetings she delighted. She 
31 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

was in splendid vein; that gay com- 
pany of clever women gathered around 
her as pretty butterflies hover about a 
queen rose, still fascinated, still en- 
tranced by this belle of ninety years. 
She wore over her pretty white dress 
the hood she had received from Brown 
University, the year before, when she 
was given the degree of Doctor of Lit- 
erature. She was as usual the central 
figure at the meeting, and gave the 
Club a vivid account of her visit to 
Smith College, whither she had gone 
the week before to receive another de- 
gree. The next morning she worked 
at her ^' Definition of True Rehgion; '' 
five days later, the smnmons came. 
Leaving the task unfinished, as she 
would have said, '^ the iron to cool 
upon the anvil,'' she passed on to the 
32 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

larger task that now absorbs her ardent 
spirit. 

During her last years she received 
many letters, even printed documents, 
with minute inquiries touching her 
method of life. A society of Nono- 
genarians sent a set of questions about 
her habits of body, and mind, with a 
postscript asking especially to what she 
attributed her unusually prolonged ac- 
tivity. Though I am sure she must 
have answered, for she was faithful 
beyond belief in such matters, we 
have found no record of her answer. 
Now she has left us, her children are 
often asked the same sort of question 
about her: 

'' How did she do it? '' 

*^ What was her secret? ^^ 

" Why did she die ninety-one years 
33 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

young, instead of ninety-one years 
old? '' 

If she herself had tried to tell you 
her secret, to account for her rare 
powers preserved so late in Hfe, spent 
so prodigally at an age when the lean 
and slippered pantaloon hoards his 
scant store of strength as a miser 
hoards his gold, she would have said 
something like this: 

^^ You must remember I had a splen- 
did Irish wet-nurse! '^ 

Perhaps she laid too much stress on 
that excellent woman's share in making 
her all she was (no foster-mother was 
ever more faithfully remembered by 
nursling) ; she owed something, surely, 
to her forebears. She came of good old 
fighting stock; in her veins thrilled the 
blood of Francis Marion, the Swamp 
34 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

Fox of Virginia, of General Greene, 
both heroes of the Revolution, of that 
staunch old rebel, Roger Williams, of 
the Wards, for two generations colo- 
nial Governors of Rhode Island. All 
this fighting blood, together with her 
red hair, gave a certain mihtant touch 
to her character; she was a good fighter 
for every just cause, especially the 
cause of Peace Though she spoke 
oftener of the Irish wet-nurse than 
of her ancestors, she did not altogether 
forget them as an anecdote told by my 
sister, Mrs. Richards, proves. They 
were at some meeting, a religious 
gathering I think, where one speaker 
— rather an effete pessimist — closed 
a speech in the key of the " Everlast- 
ing No,'' with the doleful words: 
^' I feel myself weighed down by 
35 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

a sense of the sins of my ances- 
tors/^ 

My mother, who was the next 
speaker, sprang to her feet with the 
retort : 

" And I feel myself lifted up on the 
virtues of mine! '^ 

There rang out the key-note of her 
life, the ^' Everlasting Yea,'' the trum- 
pet-tone to which all high souls rally. 

Many people have had fine wet- 
nurses; a legion have the same legacy 
of power in their blood, who do not 
accomphsh much with it. 

Poeta nascitur^ non UV. She was of 
course born an uncommon person, 
but I believe the manner and habits 
of her life, quite as much as her native 
power, made for her vigorous old age. 
As I look back on the intimate compan- 
30 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

ionship of a lifetime, I realize that 
these excellent Hfe habits, habits that 
any one of us can cultivate, had even 
more to do with her long continued use- 
fulness than the great Irish wet-nurse 
herself. 

First, and last, and all the time, she 
worked, and worked, and worked, 
steadily as nature works, without rest, 
without haste. She was never idle, 
she was never in a hurry. Though she 
played too, earnestly, enthusiastically, 
it was never idle play; there was al- 
ways a dash of poetry in her pastime, 
whether it was making a charade for 
the Brain Club, or composing a nursery 
rhyme for her grandchildren. The 
capacity for work like everything else 
grows by cultivation. She started 
life with a rarely active mind and tem- 
37 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

perament. So do many people. It 
was the habit of study, of concentra- 
tion, of work, carefully cultivated from 
the first, held on to in spite of difficul- 
ties — she had plenty of them — that 
wrought what seemed to some of her 
contemporaries a miracle. She could 
say like Adam in Shakespeare's play 
^^ As You Like It:" 

" My age is as a lusty winter; 

Frosty, but kindly: let me go with you; 
I'll do the service of a younger man 
In all your business and necessities.'' 

'' Let me go with you! '' This is 
what Age is forever saying to Youth. 
'^ Do not leave me behind — I can 
still serve! '' So long as Age makes 
good the claim, heydey, headlong, 
good-natured Youth lets the veteran 
march in its glorious ranks. Youth 
38 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

does not crowd him out, as the veteran 
too often thinks, he drops out because 
he '' cannot keep the pace! '' The 
reason she did not drop out was because 
she made good her claim. The children 
and grandchildren of those with whom 
she first enlisted, were content to have 
her march with them, still in the 
van. 

Her training, from her very start in 
Hfe, made her a cosmopohtan; one of 
the factors of this world citizenship 
was her very early study of foreign 
languages. French, Italian and Latin 
she knew almost from the time she 
could speak, so that she gathered into 
her spirit the essence of the race genius 
of the Latins. Later came the Teu- 
tonic baptism, for she only learned 
German at fourteen, when her adored 
39 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

brother, Sam Ward, came home from 
Heidelberg, brimming over with the 
songs, the poetry, the philosophy of 
Germany. She studied Schiller and 
Goethe with ardor — among her treas- 
ures, we have found a long autograph 
letter from Goethe to her tutor. Dr. 
Cogswell. In her youth there were 
still cultivated French people living 
in New York, who had taken refuge 
there during the reign of terror. She 
remembered one of these gentlemen 
in exile who gave her French lessons, 
another who came to the house when 
there was a dinner party to mix the 
salad, a third who came to dress her 
hair for a ball. Then there were a 
group of Italian political exiles who 
were made welcome at her father's 
house, and the Greek boy (a fugitive 
40 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

from the unspeakable Turk), Christy 
Evangehdes, adopted by him, who till 
the day of his death spoke of her as his 
sister Julia. All these early influences 
tended to make a cosmopolitan of the 
little lady while she was still in the nur- 
sery. The general culture of the ^^ little 
old New York ^' of that time was far 
broader than that of Boston; the nar- 
row swaddUng bands of Puritan pro- 
vincialism never bound her free and 
vaulting spirit. From world citizen- 
ship to universal citizenship, to other 
world citizenship is a far cry. There 
are men and women with a truly cos- 
mopolitan spirit who never attain that 
wider universal citizenship. She often 
quoted Margaret Fuller's ^^ I accept 
the universe." Though keenly aware 
of the manner in which Margaret had 
41 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

laid herself open to ridicule by this 
high-sounding phrase, without herself 
formulating it (her sense of humor 
could never have allowed that), she 
practically did ^^ accept the uni- 
verse/' was always conscious of a sort 
of universal citizenship that made the 
affairs of every oppressed people her 
affairs. No hand, however dirty, was 
ever stretched out to her that she did 
not take it in her own and in taking it 
recognize the God in the man. She car- 
ried a touchstone in her bosom by 
which she found gold in natures that to 
others seemed trivial and base. She 
had few intimate friends, none in the 
usual sense of the term, for with all her 
bonhommie that made her the ^^ friend 
of all the world,'' the Universal Friend 
was her only real intimate. Her re- 
42 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

serve of soul was impenetrable; only 
her poems, and occasionally a page in 
her diary, give us any insight into her 
spiritual nature — glimpses of a cer- 
tain high companionship with the stars 
and the planets. 

We hear much of the dual nature 
of man. The term misleads. Man, or 
at least woman has a triple nature, is 
made up of flesh, mind and spirit. How 
did she use these three different na- 
tures — the physical, the intellectual, 
the spiritual? 

In her youth the views of health 
were very different from what they are 
now. As a child, she lived the greater 
part of the year in New York, where 
she was never encouraged to take much 
outdoor air or exercise. Every after- 
noon at three o'clock the big yellow 
43 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

and blue family coach, drawn by two 
fat horses, came to the door to take 
the children out for a drive. Even 
when they went to the country for a 
change of air, the children's complex- 
ions were more considered than their 
health. Miss Danforth, an old friend 
of the family, told my mother in later 
years of having met the Wards at the 
seaside, where Julia, who had a deli- 
cate ivory complexion, wore a thick 
green worsted veil when she went 
down to the beach. 

'^ Little Julia has another freckle 
today,'' the visitor was told. " It 
was not her fault, the nurse forgot 
her veil." 

She was from the first a natural 
student, loving her books better than 
anything else; but she was a perfectly 
44 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

normal child too and her good spirits 
and her social gifts often tempted her 
from her work. Her sister Louisa 
remembered that she used to make 
her maid tie her into her chair, so 
that she should not be able to leave 
her study should the temptation assail 
her. In spite of a too sedentary youth, 
she started life with an uncommonly 
good body. After her marriage to 
my father she received many new and 
valuable ideas on matters hygienic, 
and while never a great pedestrian 
she always walked twice a day till the 
very end of her life. Still it must be 
confessed that her muscles were the 
least developed part of her. For the 
last twenty years she was rather lame, 
the result of a fall, when her knee was 
badly injured. She was always per- 
45 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

sistent in walking as much as she was 
able however, in spite of the effort it 
cost her. During the summer and 
autumn, she passed a large part of 
the day, studying and reading, on 
the piazza of her country house at Oak 
Glen in Portsmouth, Rhode Island. 

Though for many years she left the 
housekeeping to the daughter or grand- 
daughter who was living with her, she 
always kept her own bank account 
and never allowed any one to take 
charge of her finances. She often 
lamented that her hands were so use- 
less for household tasks, envying her 
granddaughters' dexterity with scissors 
and needle. I must not forget to men- 
tion her practising. She had a beauti- 
ful voice which had been carefully 
trained in the old ItaUan method. 
46 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

She practised her scales regularly all 
her life; I have often heard her say 
she believed the exercise of singing was 
very valuable in preparing her for 
public speaking. She was faithful too 
in practising on the piano, and always 
played her scales so that her fingers 
never lost their flexibihty or the power 
to do the things she really wanted 
them to do — to hold the pen (she 
almost never dictated, but wrote every- 
thing with her own hand), to play 
the piano, to accompany her speaking 
with appropriate gestures. To the 
last her hands retained their exquisite 
shape; the cast made from them after 
death shows their unimpaired beauty. 
My father was very strict about 
diet; all ''fried abominations'' were 
taboo with him, pastry, high season- 
47 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

ing, ham, cocoanut cakes — all rich 
food — were anathema maranatha. 
From first to last she was frankly a 
rebel in this matter. It was said, in 
the family, that she had the digestion 
of an ostrich. In spite of all opposi- 
tion she calmly continued to eat what- 
ever she fancied to the end of her life. 
During her last summer she wrote 
to her physician asking permission 
to eat ham and pastry, dishes that 
to her daughters seemed a little heavy 
for summer weather. At her last 
luncheon party she was advised not 
to eat pate de foies gras or to drink 
champagne; she put aside the advice 
with the familiar remark we all knew 
so well: 

^' I have taken these things all my 
life and they have never hurt me.'' 
48 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

The fact of the matter was, she had 
a perfect digestion which she used 
carefully and never abused. She ate 
moderately and slowly, with an entire 
disregard to what is usually considered 
good for old people. She rose at seven; 
in her youth and middle age she took 
a cold bath, in later years the bath 
was tepid — well or ill, it was never 
omitted. During the last twenty 
years, that great fourth score so rich 
in happiness to herself and her family, 
and that greater family of hers, 
the Pubhc, she took a httle light wine 
with her dinner, ^' for her stomach's 
sake,'' as she would say, quoting St. 
Paul. This, with a cup of tea for 
breakfast, was the only stimulant she 
needed, for her spirits were so buoy- 
ant, her temperament so overflowing 
49 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

with the joie de vivre, that we called 
her the ^^ family champagne.'^ Break- 
fast with us was a social meal; there 
was always conversation and much 
laughter for she came down in the 
morning with her spirits at their 
highest level. She slept about eight 
hours. Until her seventieth year I 
never knew her to lie down in the 
daytime, unless she was suffering with 
headache. The first part of that 
seventieth year was not a good time 
for her. More hearty healthy people 
are killed every year by the sentence: 
^^ The days of our years are threescore 
years and ten/' than by any four 
diseases you like to name. Even her 
radiant health, her buoyant tempera- 
ment felt its depressing influence; as 
the weeks and months went by and 
50 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

she found herself quite as vigorous in 
her seventieth year as she had been in 
her sixty-ninth, she forgot all about her 
age and resumed her activities, retain- 
ing under protest the daily nap. She 
lay down with the clock on the bed 
beside her; twenty minutes was quite 
time enough to '' waste in napping! '' 
During the last five or six years, always 
grudgingly, she gave a little more time 
to resting, taking a half-hour's siesta 
before luncheon, another before dinner, 
'' to rest her back/' She always sat 
in a straight backed chair, never in her 
long life having learned how to 
'' lounge " in an easy chair. She was 
by nature a night owl and never 
wanted to go to bed if there was 
any other night owl to keep her com- 
pany. So much for her use of that 
51 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

faithful servant, the body. If the de- 
velopment of her muscles was not quite 
up to the modern standard, her intel- 
lectual training far surpassed it. From 
first to last she kept her mind in the 
same state of high training that the 
athlete keeps his body, strove for that 
perfect balance of power in all the dif- 
ferent functions of the brain that an 
all-round athlete aims for in his phy- 
sique. I never remember a time when 
she relaxed the mental gymnastics 
that kept her mind strong, supple, 
active. 

Once, at a crucial moment, when 
beset by perplexities, I asked for 
advice, her answer, stamped on my 
memory as long as it shall hold to- 
gether, was given in three Latin 
words: 

52 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

'^ Posce fortem animumJ^ Ask for 
a strong mind! The motto of her 
Enghsh friend, Edward Twistleton, 
known and loved by her generation of 
Bostonians. 

Ask for a strong mind ; ask earnestly 
enough and you will get it, will learn 
to laugh at that old-fashioned bogey, 
the fear of being considered ^' strong- 
minded." 

Long ago, when a silly acquaintance 
demanded if it was true she was a 
strong-minded woman, she parried 
with the counter thrust: 

^' Is it not better to be strong- 
minded than to be weak-minded? " 

If you want a strong mind or a strong 

body there is only one way to get it, 

by faithful exercise. There is no royal 

road, no easy short cut to either goal. 

53 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

The wise friend, the good physician 
can point out the way, you yourself 
must tread it! 

She always read her letters and the 
newspapers (history in the making) 
immediately after breakfast. Then 
came the morning walk, a bout of calis- 
thenics, or a game of ball; after this she 
settled to the real serious business of 
the day; ten o'clock saw her at her 
desk. She began the morning with 
study, took up the hardest reading she 
had on hand. In her youth she read 
Goethe; in her middle life, when she 
was deep in the study of German phi- 
losophy, Kant, Fichte or Hegel. For 
years Kant was the most intimate 
companion of her thought. In the 
early sixties, when she was in the for- 
ties, her diary was filled with Kant's 
54 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

philosophy. Sometimes she differs 
with his conclusions, sometimes am- 
plifies them, oftenest endorses them. 

'^ One chosen lover, one chosen phi- 
losopher!'' was her motto. While she 
owed much to Spinoza and records in 
her journal that Kant does not do 
him justice, her philosopher par excel- 
lence was Immanuel Kant. On her 
seventieth birthday the Saturday 
Morning Club of Boston gave her a 
beautiful jewel with seven moonstones 
and one topaz. At a dinner soon after 
she wore this jewel to pin a lace scarf. 
The conversation at table turned on 
Kantian philosophy and she was asked 
some question concerning it. 

'^ Do you think I wear the Categori- 
cal Imperative on my left shoulder? '' 
she cried. 

55 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

^^ Is this the Categorical Impera- 
tive? ^^ asked Mrs. Whitman, pointing 
to the jewel that held the lace. After 
that the club's jewel went by the name 
of one of the toughest nuts in Kant's 
philosophy. 

When she was fifty years old she 
learned Greek; from the time she 
could read it fluently, the Greek phi- 
losophers, historians, and dramatists 
shared with the Germans those pre- 
cious hours of morning study. In the 
end the Hellenes routed the Teutons, 
and remained her most cherished in- 
timates. At luncheon she would tell 
us what she had been studying, an 
excellent way to teach children his- 
tory. I shall never forget the day when 
she had read in Xenophon's Anabasis 
the account of the retreat of the 
56 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

Greeks, who formed part of the expe- 
dition of Cyrus. She came dancing 
into the dining room, where the children 
were waiting for their soup, waving her 
beautiful hands and crying: 

'^Thalatta! Thalatta! " the cry of 
the wearied Greeks on first catching 
sight of the sea, after wandering for 
years in the interior of the Persian 
empire. 

No event in history is quite so real 
to me as Hannibal's crossing the Alps. 
Day by day she took us with that 
valiant Carthaginian general on his 
long journey across Hispania, over the 
Pyrenees, through Gaul, along the 
Rhone, and over the Graian Alps. 
The day Hannibal finally got his ele- 
phants over the Little Saint Bernard 
Pass, and down into Italy, was one of 
57 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

positive rejoicing for us little ones. 
Her imagination was so keen that 
when she repeated to us what she had 
been studying, it always seemed as if 
she had seen these things with her own 
eyes, not merel}^ read about them. 
The effort of studying Greek whetted 
her mind to its keenest edge. Aristotle 
and Plato, with her Greek Testament, 
she read to the last. She talked with 
us less about the philosophers than 
the dramatists and historians. I re- 
member how much we heard about the 
Birds of Aristophanes, one of her 
favorite classics. Reading Greek was, 
I think, the greatest pleasure of her 
later life. One afternoon last summer, 
when a pretty girl of a studious turn 
came to see her, I chanced to hear her 
parting words, said with a fervor and 
58 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

solemnity that impressed the young 
visitor: 

'' Study Greek, my dear, it^s better 
than a diamond necklace! " 

After the morning plunge into Greek 
or German philosophy '' to tone up 
her mind," she took up whatever 
literary task she was at work upon, 
'^ put the iron on the anvil," as her 
phrase was, '^ and hammered " at it 
till luncheon. She was a most careful 
and conscientious writer, writing, re- 
writing, and '^ pohshing " her work 
with inexhaustible patience. Occa- 
sionally she got a poem all whole, in 
one piece, hke The Battle Hymn. 
This was rare though; as a rule she 
toiled and moiled over her manuscripts. 
In the afternoon she was at her desk 
again, unless there was some outside 
59 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

engagement — answering letters, read- 
ing books in a lighter vein, Italian 
poetry, a Spanish play, a book of 
travels or, best of all, a good French 
novel. 

Each day opened with the stern 
drill of the Greek or German phi- 
losophy, by which her mind was exer- 
cised and at the same time stored with 
the thoughts of the wise, the labors of 
the good, the prayers of the devout. 
That was the first process, the taking 
in, receiving the wisdom of the ages. 
Then came the second or creative 
process, when she gave out even as she 
had received. This regular mental 
exercise was like a series of gymnastics, 
by which the receptive and creative 
functions of the brain were kept in 
perfect working order. If you are to 
60 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

pour out, you must first pour in. If 
your lamp is to serve as a beacon light, 
it must be well trimmed and filled with 
oil every day. 

She never in my memory took up any ^ 
work after dark. Unless she was 
called abroad by some festivity or 
meeting, the evening was our play 
time. She invariably dressed for din- 
ner, which was followed by talk, whist, 
music, and reading aloud. She rarely 
used the precious daylight for reading 
English novels, so at night she was 
ready to listen to some ^^ rattUng good 
story " recommended by one of the 
grandchildren. She delighted in 
Stevenson, Crawford, Cable, Barrie, 
Stanley Weyman, Conan Doyle, Mere- 
dith, Tolstoi and Sienkiewicz. How she 
loved the friends of bookland, the 
61 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

friends who never hurt or bore! The 
new ones were welcome, but she was 
faithful to the old and liked nothing 
better than to reread those master- 
pieces of her youth, the novels of 
Scott, Dickens and Thackeray. We 
read Pickwick every year or two; she 
never wearied of the greatest English 
novelist's greatest masterpiece. A good 
ghost story made her flesh creep; she 
was often kept awake by the troubles 
of the '^ people in the book," who were 
so real to her that, when they were 
having a very bad time of it, she would 
spread her hands before her face and 
cry out : 

''Stop! Stop! I cannot endure it! '^ 

Money troubles of hero or heroine 

especially afflicted her; this was odd, 

for she bore the loss of the greater part 

62 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

of her own fortune with courage and 
equanimity. Though she knew the 
value of money, and practised the most 
touching httle economies so that she 
might have more to give away, she 
cared very httle about money and 
was always too busy with more im- 
portant matters to think much of 
it. The stories of arctic adventure, 
Jack London's especially, '' gave her 
the shivers; " she ached with the cold 
and hunger of his dogs and heroes. 
The younger people among the Us- 
teners often envied her enthusiasm. 
Her imagination was so keen, her 
power of making beheve the story was 
real so tantahzing, infectious too, that 
it carried us through many a book that 
would have been dull without it. 

One of the last books she enjoyed 
63 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

was Dr. Morton Prince's Dissociation 
of a Personality. She was deeply 
interested in this last word on psy- 
chology and every day at luncheon 
gave us an account of Sally's last prank. 
In her later years, though she wrote 
much poetry, she did not read as much 
English verse as in her youth. I do 
not know at what period she studied 
Shakespeare, but she was so familiar 
with the plays that at the theatre I 
have often heard her murmur a cor- 
rection of a line falsely given by some 
player. Her memory was prodigious; 
it was like a vast collection of pigeon- 
holes, where there was a place for 
everything, and everything was in its 
place. She seemed to have a sort of 
mental card-catalogue of all the knowl- 
edge that was stored away in her 
64 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

capacious brain. It was as if the sub- 
jects were all classified, and when she 
wished to speak, write or think on any 
given one, she consulted the catalogue, 
then went straight to the alcove in that 
well stored library and brought forth 
volume after volume dealing with the 
subject under consideration. It will 
hardly be believed that she wrote her 
volume of Reminiscences entirely from 
memory, never so much as consulting 
her own diary. It has been said of her 
that she remembered all she ever knew, 
whereas most of us forget a large part 
of what we have known. She certainly 
had an unusual command of her own 
knowledge. On one of my long absences 
in Europe, I had taken with me by 
mistake her large Worcester's dic- 
tionary, thinking it was mine. On my 
65 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

return after an absence of more than 
two years, I exclaimed: 

'^ How dreadful it was of me to take 
your dictionary — what have you done 
— did you buy a new one? " 

^^ I did not know you had taken it/' 
she said. 

^^ But — how did you get along with- 
out a dictionary? " 

She was surprised at the question. 

'^ I never use a word whose meaning 
I do not know/' 

'' But the spelling? '' 

She gave a funny little French ges- 
ture of the shoulders, inherited with 
so much else from her Huguenot an- 
cestors, of whom she knew little and 
thought much. It meant, I suppose: 

^^ When you have learned Latin, 
Greek, French, German, Spanish and 
66 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

Italian, you will have learned how to 
spell Enghsh — perhaps! '' 

At sunset, sitting upon her piazza at 
Oak Glen, her eyes fixed on the flaming 
sky beyond her pines, if she chanced 
to be alone, she would repeat an ode 
of Horace. She was learning one, line 
by line, when the summons came. 
I remember her saying that this made 
the thirtieth ode she had committed 
to memory. Nous revenons a nos 
premiers amours. Horace, the delight 
of her youth, consoled what might have 
been some lonely hours in her last days. 

So much for the regular intellectual 
drill, by which she kept her mind deli- 
cately keen, as the soldier keeps his 
weapons for the fight, as the craftsman 
keeps the tools for his work. Admirable 
as this was, it was only the secondary 
67 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

source of her power. What was it fed 
the inner flame of her life so that it 
shone through her face, as fire shines 
through an alabaster vase? 

She tapped the great life current that 
flows round the world; to those who 
know the trick, ^tis the simplest, most 
natural thing in the world to do, as 
easy as for the babe to draw the milk 
from its mother's breast. You have 
merely to put yourself '^ on the circuit,'' 
let the force universal flow through 
you, and you can move mountains or 
bridge oceans. She knew the trick; 
she was forever trying to teach it to 
others, to women in especial, to work- 
ing women above all others. 

Her first waking act was prayer, 
aspiration; her last, thanksgiving, 
praise! Just as some persons' first 
68 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

action is to open the window and fill the 
lungs with fresh air, or to drink a glass 
of cold water, hers was to open wide 
the door of her soul and let the breath 
of the Spirit blow through it. She was 
a mystic, a seer. The Battle Hymn was 
not the only poem '' given '^ her in the 
gray dawn of day when the birds were 
singing their matins; many of her best 
poems, her best thoughts came to her 
during the first moments of conscious- 
ness, when the Marthas of this world 
are wondering what they shall get for 
breakfast, or what clothes they shall 
put on. Poor Martha, dear Martha! 
Try for the upHft and the grace — 
they will come to you, even if yours 
is not the art to make a poem out of 
them. That is a special gift! Live 
your poem, and its music will turn 
69 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

the lives of those with whom you hve 
from prose to poetry, change hfe^s 
water into wine. 

She very rarely talked with her 
children on religious matters. Both 
she and my father had a dread of 
giving us the very narrow religious 
training they themselves had received. 
Conscious of the mistakes of such a 
bringing up, she shunned them and, 
though we all knew how devout a per- 
son she was, it was chiefly through her 
writings and her poems that we received 
a sense of the religious side of her 
nature. Her faith in a divine Provi- 
dence was the deep well-spring in which 
the roots of her being were fixed. She 
lived in daily communion with the 
divine life. Her diary is full of dreams 
that are like the ecstatic visions of the 
70 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

old saints. In the note already referred 
to written on the margin of a poem in 
her posthumous volume, At Sunset, she 
says: 

'^ The thought came to me that if 
God only looked upon me I should 
become radiant like a star/' 

Beatrice, her favorite of Shake- 
speare's heroines, says: 

** There was a star danced and under that I 
was born! " 

In October, the month she left us, a 
wonderful star appears in the heavens, 
and at this season of the year shines 
with an extraordinary brilliancy. She 
always watched for it and often pointed 
it out to others. 

^^ What is the name of that star? '' 
I have heard her ask more than one 
man of science. ^^ It changes color 
71 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

like a flash light in a light house, 
flashes from white to green and then 
to red.'^ At last she asked the ques- 
tion of a man who could answer it and 
learned that her star's name was 
Aldebaran and that is one of the stars 
of the constellation of Taurus. Her 
horoscope was never cast, but I believe 
that she was born under the influence 
of that wonderful star that flashes first 
the color of the diamond, then the ruby, 
and last the emerald, and that when she 
was born, Aldebaran danced! 

Though she so rarely spoke of such 
matters, we who lived with her were 
fed at second hand by that deep 
limpid stream, the river of immortal 
hfe, in which she grew rooted deep. 
One of the many manifestations of this 
was the joyousness with which she 
72 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

took up each day and its little cares. 
She always came into the room in the 
morning like a child who has some good 
news to share with the family. Those 
wonderful spirits, that overflowed in 
every sort of wit, jest and antic, took 
the sting from the bitterest nature; in 
her company the satirist grew kind, 
the cynic humane. A deep spiritual 
joy seemed to enwrap her like a sort 
of enveloping climate. Where she was, 
the sun shone, the sky was blue, birds 
sang, brooks babbled, for so tremen- 
dous was her spiritual force that it 
always conquered. It sometimes 
seemed to me as if I was conscious of 
a sort of war of temperaments between 
her and some pessimistic or cynical 
nature. It was like one of those days 
when, as we say, " the sun is trying to 
73 



»/?- 



JULIA WARD HOWE 

come out.'^ The sun of her presence 
never failed to come out, to banish the 
gray fog of the blues, the sufferings 
of the irritable or the disheartened. 
When people came to talk to her of 
their troubles, as they often did, the 
troubles seemed to shrink Uke the 
clouds on a dark day, leaving first a 
little peep of blue visible, and finally 
the whole sky, clear and fervid. 

One word more, take it as a legacy, 
a keepsake from her. I asked her 
for a statement of the ideal aim of life. 
She paused a moment, then summed up 
the mighty matter in one sentence, 
clear and cosmic as a single rain-drop, ^ 
a very epitome of her own life: l^ 

'^To Learn, To Teach, To Serve, 
And To Enjoy! '' 



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